Letting Go

Listen on:

There is a time to let go. To recognize what you have been hanging on to, and to ask yourself, does it serve me to continue hanging on to this?

The release is scary.

Sometimes, hanging on to something lets us continue to play out the story that sometime, someday, we will have the thing we are craving. Hanging on is the ego’s way of having what we want without having to really create it. Hanging on seems like it keeps things present and makes the goal more real, but instead, it simply reinforces the experience of not having what you want and holding on to both that fact, and the thought that some day you will have what you want.

Hanging on robs you of the present. And that is safe.

We’re all hanging on to things. Ideas for what could be, how things may go differently, how things will one day go back to how they once were (or how they never will, and they’ll always stay this way).

We hang on to the past, just like we hang on to the future. We hang on to the idea that the past should have gone differently, and that things should be different now, and the reason they aren’t is because of how they went, and on and on.

Hanging on to something simply keeps us from being with what is here, right now. It robs us of the moment that is available here in the present, by holding us in the future, past, or wherever else what we are hanging on to resides.

There’s risk in letting go — it means we may have to be with whatever is actually here in the present. In letting go of whatever you are holding, you may have to be with the heartbreak that that evokes. You may have to be with your hurt and sadness, or anger and frustration.

You may have to be with life.

COVID is inviting us to let go. To let go of the convenience and comfort and generally just the “way it went” before this. To let go of the idea that we should just be able to get on a plane and fly anywhere we want all the time. To let go of the idea that eating out three-four times a week is normal. To let go of the idea that things will go back to how they were, or to let go of the idea that they won’t.

These things don’t need to be your list of what to let go of — I’m sharing them because they’re some of mine.